well i've been to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight the big picture. today americans witnessed the second deadliest school shooting in u.s. history as a gunman stormed a connecticut elementary school killing twenty children and six school staff members is the horrifying and sickening tragedy the finally convinces lawmakers in washington to at least bring back ronald reagan's assault weapons ban and right now millions of americans are suffering from type two diabetes constantly having to take insulin shots watch their blood sugar levels as type two diabetes really a lifelong condition or is it possible to reverse the progression of that disease

as dr neal barnard tonight's conversations with great minds and republicans are sharpening their knives for perry to tear medicare apart at the expense of millions of senior citizens across the nation as president obama prepared to stand up to republicans in congress or will he cave under the pressure and take away that health care for millions. you need to know this this is no longer an issue of gun rights it's an issue of human rights it's an issue of whether or not the rights of americans who don't own deadly weapons will finally be respected in our nation it's an issue of whether or not those who just want to go to a movie theater with their family or just want to go shopping at the mall or just want to send their kids to elementary school and live in an america where they and their family won't be gunned down by their. fellow citizens. the second time in

a week a mass shooting has rocked the nation but this one is almost too horrific to imagine reading the reports of the range twenty year old man walked into a connecticut elementary school this morning armed with two handguns and convene a massacre targeting mostly children and i reports are that at least twenty children are dead six adults and the shooter himself it was president obama's reaction to the news. we've endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years and each time i learn the news. reacts not as a president but as anybody else would. as a parent the majority of those who died today were children. beautiful little kids between the ages of five and ten years old. we're going to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this regardless of the

politics early reports indicate that the man's mother was a teacher at the school she was killed too along with the school's principal and the school's psychologist will take some time until we find out why this man did what he did if we are find out all we still don't know why n.f.l. player. belcher killed his wife and then himself with a handgun but we do know we're not allowed to talk about the role the handgun played in all of that bob costas find that out when he went on t.v. and quoted a column from fox sports columnist jason whitlock who wrote our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy and a more convenient store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. or more disputes with teachers and faculty at schools or financial or domestic problems at home or mental illness within we'll leave more of our children dead in mass shootings we're told by the powerful corporate gun lobby to talk about guns and gun reform is off limits

in our elected lawmakers including the one who lives in the white house. no one talked about gun reform in a serious way just like no one talk seriously about gun reform after the aurora theater massacre earlier this year and no one talk seriously about gun reform after the sikh temple massacre and no one talked about serious gun reform after the tucson massacre last year that nearly killed former congresswoman gabby giffords there was no serious gun reform talk after the virginia tech massacre in two thousand and seven or after columbine and since no one talked about gun reform after kostis made that mistake. gun reform after the deadly mass shooting in oregon earlier this week and then today so of course jay carney at the white house told reporters that today is not the day to talk about gun reform but is that really because we should respect the victims by not engaging in a political debate. or is it because our elected politicians including our

president don't have the courage to stand up to the gun lobby in america they and the rest of the nation for that matter are ready to confront the dark realities of a gun crazed nation and the unimaginably daunting task ahead of us of actually doing something about this reality so i'll say we need to wait to talk about gun reform and just forget about it and then another bad shooting at a lather lind's rinse repeat and perhaps more importantly when are we going to have a conversation in america about how all this gun violence is tied into our lack of good mental health treatment or about tax cuts and their relationship to murder seriously multiple international and us studies have found that homicide goes up as inequality goes up so what are you to discuss the negative impacts on our nation the post reagan explosion in the quality we need leaders in america now more than ever and men and women in positions of power to take on the entrenched interests of the corporate gun lobby and most importantly we the people who don't own guns and

don't think the second amendment gives us the right to assault rifles high capacity magazines and gun ownership for the violent or mentally ill we must speak out even louder gun or formal happen when we make it happen and are ready to tackle this in our demon that is the gun culture in america. today being friday let's turn things over to our big picture rumble on our panel tonight marc harrold libertarian author commentator attorney vince colony's senior online editor with the daily caller and the reverend d.l. xander boehlert president of the detroit chapter of rainbow push will be joining us and so the shooter was armed with a nine millimeter six hour handgun in the early reports there were nine millimeter glock handgun and he had a semiautomatic rifle in his car both handguns were registered to his mother which . really feeds the story that we see so many times about it's the handgun in the family that the kid uses to accidentally shoot himself or. intentionally kill

himself or kill somebody else. but with regard to just this whole idea of the right to bear arms when that was written seventy nine he wanted to the constitution. the state of the art of guns was if you took a long rifle and important gun powder and then you tamp it down with a rod and then you drop a ball in there and then you tamp that down with a rod and then you flip the thing up you poor little gunpowder into the flintlock and then you pull back and if everything was properly done you might get off one shot and if somebody were to walk into a mcdonald's with one of those front loaders and fire off one shot by the time they got around to reloading the thing that for the second shot they would have been dragged out and you know just. dragged off to jail or whatever. pretty. do we really does anybody here really think that the second amendment means that we have the right to have semiautomatic weapons. i think that the founders were as you mentioned just now conceptualizing semiautomatic weapons but i also don't think

that they were necessarily thinking that technology wouldn't advance i mean obviously it had gotten to the point where they were able to create a goal that's what jefferson said if you know every twenty years we should reinvent the constitution he said you shouldn't expect a man to wear the clothes that he wore as a boy you know that we grow up and you know the first part of the second amendment says in order to maintain a well regulated militia so let's say the only people who own guns are people who are militia members first let me say it's good to be on the show and secondly we want to extend our prayers and condolences to all of those who are affected by this tragedy we've seen this happen to many times this year so our prayers go out to the parents and to the students and all of the victims but to your point i mean obviously the original intent behind the right to bear arms does not i think allow for people to have semiautomatic weapons people have super clips you know and we've been here before but what we have not been able to do in the united states of america is can. seen

a national conversation about the rising tide of violence the rising tide of gun violence specifically and reform as it relates to the gun industry i think the gun lobby is so strong we just have a position of silent all and there's no anti-gun lobby i mean mark in the united states you are one thousand nine hundred percent more likely one thousand and a half times more likely to be killed by a mass shooter than in any of the other developed countries of the world that have roughly equivalent income levels of the united states comparing apples to apples and and and the one thing that you find that the major difference between those countries and us is that we're wildly more unequal than they were back in the fifty's in the sixty's in the seventy's when we were when our equality looked like europe we were having these kind of mass shootings you know well let me first of all it's kind of ironic this seems to be this one issue out of the entire constitution seems to be the one issue that certain individuals who are you know strict gun control on the left and i'm generalizing want to talk about original

intent everything else but number of privacy and all these other things they don't like original intent they hate school way they don't want to talk about what was the constitution is resident in school it is in turn one hundred and i'm just saying that general raised like a fine but just what i'm saying is this is going to be one area where all the sudden we want to talk about what the constitution meant when it was written that being said and i think this is an opportunity for president obama to really take advantage of his constitutional credentials man was the editor in chief of the harvard law review he's very he's a constitutional law professor be believing in the second amendment this isn't necessarily not coincide with believing some gun control the bottom line is every constitutional amendment the first the fourth anything there's a compelling government interest and it can meet what's called strict scrutiny the highest level of scrutiny by the supreme court then the law can pass constitutional muster so i think how you present this is i believe in second amendment rights i believe that people have an individual right to guns but there are compelling government interest in certain types of weapons and we go from there i so we need the conversation i agree with that but so you're talking about let's bring back ronald reagan's assault weapon. well first rod let's remember the connecticut has

an assault weapon ban so i didn't research the research i've done a lot of it was there not assault weapons or i don't want to people i'm saying start some home a lot of people call for all these new laws but there are laws in place that criminalize everything that happened here it certainly is illegal to shoot children i understand why people want new laws but sometimes you have take step back and say what do you want the laws to do because everything that happened was already illegal you have an address inequality reverend bullock i'm curious your thoughts on this we are we are us and singapore to most on equal nations among the developed nations in the world and singapore is a police state so they have a slightly difference and it's a little tiny city little different situation but we're just we're a huge outlier indeed i mean i think we must consider the role of inequality as a relates to the rise in the number of c.c.w. is in a number of folks who become gun owners for instance in the city of detroit we've seen as the economic fallout has become greater that more people are now getting c.c.w. use it and acquiring firestorm very well that's right and so we must consider how

any quality motivates people to arm themselves and must consider also how any quality influences the kind of the public policies and social programs that are extra cut and so mentally ill not receiving the starburst is that they're supposed to receive and then of course plato got it right and for public book one don't give the madman the gun even if it is the madman's gun it's amazing how plato could have got that right but we get it wrong in america three thousand three thousand years and so so so the inequality question the underclass question the poverty question. is why didn't they all realize question two because the other half of inequality is billionaires vince nobody's talking about this nobody's talking about well i mean today it's you know we'll see what happens in the coming days i mean obviously when you have a tragedy like this there is people are trying to make sense of it and get to the facts and i think that was what motivated the white house a lot today you saw carney as you mentioned in the in the opening segment say that today was not the day to talk about gun control but when the president came out he did. i'd say we need to get beyond politics and look at what we can do so it looked

like the president was making and i could see that i could see conservative talk radio heads exploding all over the country when he said that it didn't work but the conversation happens more on tonight's big picture. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize

everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harkin welcome to the big picture. here is mitt romney trying to figure out the name of that thing that we americans call a dollar. i'm sorry i'm just a guy who cares an awful lot about what you. are you know what kind of cells he wants us to defeat terrorism the olympics and the current political. confusedly just because it's going to hurt you distracts us from what you and i should care about because there are profit driven industry that sells a sensationalistic garbage. that breaking news i'm having martin and we're going to

break this that. bags of a picture of old johnny tonight are marc harrold vince colonies and there are indeed alexander bullock let's get back to it michigan is developing a reputation as the most anti-democratic as in small d democratic state in the nation following the passage of right to work for less legislation this week the law was passed undemocratically by surprise like both here it is through pressure from corporate corporate oligarchy as u.a.w. president bob king said in the end that divide us and the extreme right wing control what's going on in this state and the koch brothers americans for prosperity was in there and it was a lot of money pushing for the passage of this legislation threatening the governor and threatening the different representatives passed as part of

a big budget appropriations bill the mayor more difficult for voters to repeal and the republican lawmakers in the state legislature passed it also passed a law making it harder to recall elected officials cutting down the numbers of days to collect signatures so i want to start with you. this is your home state sure and mine although i haven't lived there in a while but you live there now is democracy dead in michigan what the heck's going on there you know what we funeral as democracy this summer and then democracy was reborn on november the sixth when the people in the state of michigan voted to repeal emergency management as a public policy approach in the state and so we won democracy was celebrated and protected now governor rick snyder tricky rick up to his old tricks again they have passed a new emergency manager law and put an appropriation it right so that now this new emergency manager can't be repealed it is referendum proof is democracy did what it's on the ropes and so right now in the state of michigan we've got

a lot of work to do because there are a number of policies right to work also has an appropriation in it that can't be repealed they are also tailoring so that you cannot recall elected officials and so michigan is becoming as i've said the new mississippi has become a nato. state in the united states of america so it's becoming the new you know pick pick your tinpot dictator. vince the right to work for less was say that you can benefit from your association with the union in the workplace you can force the union to defend you spend resources you can actually burn out a union by demanding that they constantly do things for you and yet you can choose not to pay for do you think that if if i wanted to be a member my little company want to be a member of the chamber of commerce that i should be able to go to them and say i want all the benefits of being a member of the chamber of commerce but i don't think i want to pay the dues right yeah i mean that should be probably something that gets resolved in the law i mean maybe they need to go further and as the essence of right to work and see don't

anybody and put it in place where you get into a position where you if you seek union representation i believe you have to begin paying to know ok well then that is the law in all graduate into law states that say that support the concept should be and i believe it is if you choose not to be a part of the union expect not to have the union services that your behalf but that's i think that's a reasonable yeah but on the on the flip side of this equation and this is what right to work advocates argue for is that people shouldn't be compelled to join a union just by virtue of their not going to work so i guess that's reasonable well no you cannot apply in a town where the only employment is you need employment because a lot of people are not compelled to join it so in a union in the united states of america we understand how democracy works everybody didn't vote for president barack hussein obama but he's everybody's president and so this is this union and this is what abraham lincoln referred to this country is that you know that's right so in the workplace you people vote if the majority votes signs off on the check card to be to join the union then you go with the vote

of the majority people and not force them that coerced to join that you know that you do you get a job not to join a civic organization but to get a paycheck and you go and you go to to produce a product i mean this is not you know this is this is different then conventional amounts of civil society when you're talking. about like you know joining together in a political party or voting it's not quite the same i would say and i don't think it's not an incline a citizen of the united states but you know i don't expect my house to burn down so i don't want a you know for the taxes that support the fire department argue this right to work you know there's it's all over the place i originally had a real problem because i found the associational problem with that right to association other words i didn't really. you know i have a problem there but to me the association thing really is a government infringement thing it's not is necessarily in the workplace and it's a little confusing but what i'll say we have right to work yeah apologize right to work my main problem with right to work and it's sort of on the other end of the spectrum is it's still at its core a law that gets in the way of private contract between management and their union

so you want to go back pre-one nine hundred thirty eight supreme court and do away with child labor laws well no see again to go back to what i said there first of all if the child labor laws the thirty seven thirty eight switch a few times at spring which was prepared with thirty eight the supreme court how would you have the car labor laws or a violation of your right to comment as you have the contract clause in there with the federal law this is a state law so it's a little apples and oranges but no it's not because it's all based on the wagon right now i have no problem with and have for those that again going back to my original point in the guns those are laws that would pass scrutiny because of how compelling the governmental interest is in protecting children here you have all adults you know you want to repeal the wagonette you want to go back to one hundred thirty five and do it with a national labor relations act just do away with the right to unionize and go back to i want law i asked her where the family i'll just have a lot of oh you know the national labor relations act absolutely have a i have problems all through all the way from when you're talking about in the thirty's and the way that the commerce clause was interpreted to let certain of these things happen and basically because they've the new deal regulations came through the court switched in the new deal but yeah i have

a problem with the right to work in so far as it's still an infringement on a private college so here's the question of the stuff you're talking about yeah i have a lot of problems with it but it's very good question vince you know how do you balance the power of a corporation where. you have the you have the right of organized. capital that's called a corporation that's organized capital is functionally a union. shouldn't the workers have the right to organize themselves as well they should have the right to be able to seek employment revver they like they should have the right to choose not to be a part of you so if you put the corporation as an association is protect there's all kinds of benefits that come all kinds of tax benefits all kinds of legal protections rights of liability and shouldn't there be protection of the work benefits that are given to those corporations do end up in the pockets of workers this happens not just the contrail they don't it's you know who i mean obviously unless you think that any l.s.a.t. by the way i don't know that of the workers i know that in both of your cases you consider corporations to be evil and at odds and i don't i own a corporation i'm also a you know a member of the going to church is

a corporation ok here you go no i don't have an ecclesiastical corporation i mean but what we have to tell the truth on the show tonight the scene from this is are from us profits that are generated. corporation are not transferred or transmitted back to the workers they go to the c.e.o.'s they go to upper management we are going to we're going to have to rely on the router holder so it does go to them if you look at it it's brought a sense ok you get the last word that our hero this holiday things you ever be a good example and thank you all for joining me thank you for that occurred. when the koch brothers funded candidate study can and richard mourdock overreached on abortion in mississippi and indiana those republican sealed their political demise with female voters while damaging the brand of their party nationwide as

well similarly when the koch brothers funded republicans in michigan rammed through anti-union right to work for less money legislation as the president called it they damaged their brand with working people now it's up to president obama to make sure he. he doesn't follow these cokehead republicans into the political wilderness by sticking retirement age people with a raw deal during these so-called fiscal cliff negotiations in an interview with a.b.c. news president bush that's airing tonight a new president obama hinted that he may support raising the eligibility age for medicare from sixty five to sixty seven years old as though he was reading straight from speaker john boehner his talking points when asked about raising the retirement age the president said what is true is we need to strengthen social security we need to strengthen medicare for future generations the current path is not sustainable because we've got an aging population and health care costs are shooting up so quickly he didn't say no in other words in fact the major thing

that's hurting medicare right now is the republican poison pill they put into it during the bush years medicare part d. which forces medicare to pay for pharmaceuticals at full retail the price of a single pill even though you're buying a million of them instead of negotiating discounts like the pentagon doesn't like walgreens does the result is that medicare is overpaying for drugs to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a decade instead stupidly democrats are letting republicans drive the discussion of how to save medicare money by talking about the eligibility age which would even save our government money into a little to shift the medicare cause of sixty five to sixty seven year olds into the general fund or the states and to some extent and consumers themselves and if president obama gives in to republicans and raises the eligibility age for medicare they'll be creating his very own todd akin moment which has to be what the republicans are hoping will too. he'll end up taking the heat for their anti

retiring policies. a recent poll shows just how unpopular cuts or raising the medicare eligibility age are of americans and asked of spending on medicare should be cut as part of a fiscal cliff deal seventy four percent of americans so they oppose the idea when asked if the medicare eligibility age should be lifted to sixty seven years old fifty nine percent of americans oppose the idea despite the overwhelming opposition by the american people republicans have a doozy astley staked out these two positions when it comes to medicare. and just like in michigan they'll eventually face the consequences for this betrayal of working people as well. so i president obama should right now very publicly walk away from any conversation about raising the eligibility age in fact he might be doing that right now senator dick durbin told reporters on thursday that the white house is taking any hikes to the medicare eligibility age off the table but he also

said he hadn't heard that directly from the white house we'll see if that's the case so far the president has made raising taxes on the rich the cornerstone of his fiscal cliff proposal which is spot on as a political strategy since that same mcclatchy poll mentioned earlier shows fifty seven percent of americans support a tax hike on those who make more than a quarter million dollars a year all this talk of a so-called balanced deal is just republicans trying to bait the president into becoming the retirees they can there's nothing balanced about making richie riches like mitt romney pay a little bit more in taxes while sticking seniors the poor and the disabled and sick with billions of dollars in extra health care costs given that effective tax rates for the rich today are at historic lows in america and over a trillion dollars in spending cuts were passed last year when republicans held the president. raising taxes alone makes for a balanced deal dolly got it when confronted with

a republican talking point that medicare is unsustainable president obama should echo the words of progressive senator sherrod brown who fired back with this. i don't buy this is not sustainable anymore the defense budget is not sustainable i mean we owe billions of dollars down the line of course we can fix these things it with changes at the margin without radical surgery which sets up a perfect line of discussion about our national priorities do we cut health care for seniors or do we cut weapons contracts for war profiteers republicans have made their choice to cut health care for seniors and they'll have to live with it the polls in two thousand and fourteen for president obama to say stand in that same political space with them would be political suicide democrats created medicare and it's up to president obama to save the republicans otherwise the entire democratic party may find itself wandering in the political wilderness for years to come.

we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old don't you tell the truth. i think i am a total get of that. and. he was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the. place .

you know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big picture.